Top 5 Twitch Content Round-Up: April 24 – 30, 2017

Every week, The Esports Observer analyzes the top 5 Twitch content watched last week, and breaks down the major competitions, events and news influencing streaming media in video games. The rankings are decided by the total number of hours watched for each title, from Monday to the following Sunday, compiled using Influencer.gg.

The arrows signal whether a game has risen or fallen in the rankings

1. Dota 2 (+21.6M)

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The Kiev Major pulled in 11 million total hours of viewership on the DotaMajor Russian-language channel.[/perfectpullquote]

Related posts:

The most talked about Dota 2 event of the season completely killed it on Twitch. The Kiev Major pulled in 11 million total hours of viewership on the DotaMajor Russian-language channel, and a further 9 million on the English-language channel; making them the two most watched channels of the entire week. It’s a significant draw even compared to PGL’s previous Boston Major in December 2016, which drew 12 million total hours of viewership from both channels.

These numbers stand in stark contrast to various articles that surfaced last week, which cast doubt on Dota 2’s future as an esport. On Glixel, Will Parton used the story of Cloud 9 to explain how Valve inevitably set up a flawed eco-system for the competitive scene, while Immortals CEO Noah Winston, in an interview for Forbes, cited the tournament structure and player incentives as a key reason why his organization still don’t have a Dota squad.

As mentioned last week, a new update to Dota 2’s matchmaking system (which now requires players to register under a phone number) is a welcome measure against duplicate accounts and “smurfing”. Aside from a minor concern of how those in poorer regions will adapt, Prime Matchmaking is otherwise heralded as an improvement.

2. League of Legends (-0.1M)

A weekend on from the LCS Spring finals, and it’s a drop in the bucket loss for LoL viewership. The Mid Season Invitational is designed to showcase the Spring champions for each regional league, and will run all the way until the end of May. In its first week alone the competition brought in over 1 million hours of total viewership to Riot Game’s main Twitch channel and, since the tournament is hosted in Brazil, Riot’s domestic channel in the South American region also drew in 500,000 hours.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]A major shift in the media paradigm for LoL could take place in a year’s time.[/perfectpullquote]

A news bombshell also dropped on the weekend. The LPL (China’s LoL circuit) is officially franchising – teams will have permanent spots, and relegation will be a thing of the past. Tencent also announced at their conference plans for a dedicated Chinese esports TV channel. With the LCS to confirm franchising plans soon, a major shift in the media paradigm for LoL could take place in a year’s time.

Blizzard’s CCG may not have drawn anything near the esports viewership as its MOBA rivals, but the Dreamhack Hearthstone Grand Prix was still an esports highlights of last week, attracting nearly 512,000 hours of total viewership. Not only that, but last Monday Hearthstone officially reached its 70 million player milestone.

On the horizon, the game’s first major Wild tournament has also been announced for sometime after the end of May. In this format, every card ever printed for the game will be usable (even those that dropped out the yearly rotation). It’ll be intriguing to see whether the boundless deck creativity will be any kind of draw for viewership.

5. Counter Strike: Global Offensive (-1.6M)

Considered the main attraction of Dreamhack Austin 2017, the CS:GO open tournament saw a surprising win for British team Gambit Esports, and in the process gathered 1.2 million total hours of viewership across all channels.

This week, ESL are bringing the IEM Sydney 2017 competition to Twitch. This has already seen a viewership spike for a channel that, due to the ESL Pro League’s exclusive broadcasting deal with Youtube Gaming, exists mostly to show reruns of past Counter Strike tournaments.

Honourable mentions:

The beta for SMITE Tactics, a new turn-based spin-off Hi-Rez’s tier-two MOBA, brought in nearly 570,000 total hours of viewership.

Two marathons of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the seminal science education series, generated 300,000 hours. This does pale somewhat in comparison to Twitch’s Power Rangers marathon, which had over 4 million hours of viewership in its first week alone…

Graham is a business journalist with The Esports Observer, with four years writing in the industry. He covers the governance side of esports, including federations/associations and the Olympic movement. In addition, he is the host of The Esports Observer podcast, and is a frequent moderator at conferences and events. His previous journalistic work covered music and film.